Calf to Codex

 I don't think I ever posted about this back when it happened, so I figured now would be a good time.

In about 2010 (I think), Master Johannes von Narrenstein had a brilliant idea. We in the SCA, he posited, have all the skills needed to produce a book from start to finish. We have parchment makers and bookbinders, we have calligraphers and painters, we have people who make paints from scratch out of authentic pigments. Why not make a book?

The project took five years, and about seventy-five people, most of whom were poets and composers who provided the content for the book. But they did it, and Codex Mediterraneae is a thing that exists, and I and my child were part of it.

I don't have pictures of all the pages; I was given only the first "gathering" or "quire" of eight pages, and only had to write on about half of them. The very first poem was written about the Middle Kingdom's first king, and set to music in a style that honored the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. I took an online course in medieval music notation so that I could transcribe the music to medieval notation and make it "look right" for our book.

The lyrics and notation for the song.

Everything about this book was done as authentically as possible. The pages were parchment made from donated deer hides. The writing was done with black and red ink made from medieval recipes, and a goose quill pen. I was not allowed a pencil to sketch things, I was given a stick of lead! 

Here are as many photos as I could find of the project, with as little rambling commentary as possible.

Testing the inks and alphabet

A mockup of the text and notation of the first page.

Penciled guidelines for the pages

A marble slab to mull pigment, a bottle of gum arabic solution, a glass rod to stir them together, and a shell to put the paint in. I ended up not mulling the red at all.

Painting the guidelines onto the vellum, without a ruler; if you look closely, you can see where I scraped off the leftmost line because I got the spacing incorrect on it.

One page fully lined.

"On the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, a song of history based upon the Agincourt Carol. Words by Nicolaa de Bracton; tune by Ursula Mortimer."

Lining the page for musical notation is not at all the same as lining it for text!

The page is paperclipped to my guidelines on all sides.

My practice sheet, with the modern notation above and medieval neumes on the bottom.

Copying the musical notes onto the page so that they line up correctly with the words.

Page two of the music. I only included notation for verse one and the refrain; the rest of the lyrics are written as poetry.

The remaining verses.

My favorite part of my assignment: The book curse!

"If anyone take away this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen." This is a translation of an actual book curse from the Middle Ages.

Preparation to mull pigments for paint.

Assistance with mulling azurite into a fine enough powder to make paint. This is my child, age 10 at the time.

Azurite behaves oddly in that it gets lighter the longer you mull it. The pale yellow-blue to the left is not what we wanted, but the darker blue is almost too gritty to paint with. It definitely added texture to the page, let's put it that way.

An example page from the 1400s of the illumination style we were to use. We were given several options to play with, but this was the style I preferred.

Sketching a beast modeled after one found on a tapestry dated to the early 1400s.

Preparing the gold leaf; as with the rest of the book, we were not to use modern adhesives. Behind the leaf, you can see a tiny jar of garlic juice.

Gilding upside down, as one does.

Burnishing the gold onto the page so that it will stay.

Sweeping away the excess to reveal the letter underneath.

Painting with garlic juice, in the areas where the gold is intended to stick.

A page of gilded initials.

A fully gilded page, ready to paint.

The gold is in place on this page but the excess has not yet been brushed away.

I always enjoy that before-and-after moment of gilding.

Base colors on the beast; the green is still wet here.

Vine work, leaves, and flowers are added to the golden bar.

The page fully illuminated.

Penwork around the initials on the music page; you can see where the gritty azurite failed to provide fine lines around the red "I".

Another page decorated and ready to go.

Not shown is my child assisting with the painting; the scales were laid out in white and then covered in blue, to give them good contrast with the green. My child painted the blue entirely without help.

Finally the beast was highlighted in shell gold, and delicate vines added around it. In closeup, it may be possible to see the name "Arrantxa" (my SCA name at the time) written inside part of the vine underneath the beast. It actually reads "Arrantxa et Celeste me fecit." Arrantxa and Celeste made me. Celeste was my child's SCA name at the time.

The book itself has traveled to many SCA events to be read and sung from, and has been featured in at least one magazine article. You can read it here.

The Calf to Codex Project remains to this day one of the highlights of my scribal career, and I'm proud to have been even a small part of it.

A commission for a friend

I was busy enough teaching online classes this summer that I forgot to update my blog. I was also posting to other sites and social media locations, so unfortunately I treated this space as a lower priority. Let's fix that. 

Earlier in the year I was approached by a lady who wanted to commission me to make four matching cards for herself and three lifelong friends of hers. The cards would have their names, a bird associated with each name, and the word "Love" in the middle. 

Experiments with the treatment of "love"

After that it was time to cut my cards to size and lay them out. Centering text is always a challenge for me, but I got it right eventually. Thank goodness for mockups. 

The cards, all laid out

Then it was time to actually write the words: probably the easiest calligraphy assignment I've ever had, this commission was going to be ALL about the illumination.

After that, it was time to pencil in all the illustration; the challenge here was that once I had one card done, I couldn't simply copy it for the others. If you look closely, you'll note that the names on the cards above "rotate", which means that the birds associated with each name also rotate and are in a different corner on each card.

What I ended up doing was laying out one card completely, then since the ground I used here was translucent, I either traced the birds directly, or flipped the card over and traced the reverse side to get the "backwards" version of the bird. The picture below shows all the cards laid out finally, as well as my cluttered workspace and a bit of the photocopied manuscript page I used for inspiration.

I had just gotten some new gilding adhesives -- a gesso for raised gilding, as well as a flat size -- and I couldn't wait to try them out. You saw the results in my previous post, but those leaves and dots were much larger than what I ended up needing for this commission.

Because I was feeling impatient, there were places where the gesso didn't go down as smoothly as it could have on this first card, but I was able to correct that for the second one. The only trouble I really found was that raised gilding is a slow process no matter what you do, and the repetition of so much gilding on four cards really got to me. 

Problems with gilding are not an issue if you're not in a hurry, but they're still annoying. And this was with a really good gesso that ordinarily worked very well.

The first card, halfway through gilding

Second card, gilding almost complete

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy gilding, but this was a LOT of gold. And a lot of repetition.

So I only did two cards with the gesso, and the latter two cards were done with flat size. MUCH faster, and a cure for the procrastination that was plaguing me throughout this project.

If you look closely you can see the light shining on the flat size, here on the third card

Where the gesso took anywhere between a few hours and overnight to cure and be ready to work with, the flat size was ready in about ten minutes. It also didn't require the extra step of breathing to "activate" the gesso so that it would be tacky enough to hold the gold. Not to sound like an advertisement or anything, but "Jerry Tresser's Pink Stuff" is a really great material to work with. The gold stayed put and didn't need a second application to cover any bare spots.

A closeup of the hawk in one corner of the third card

You know how I love my before and after pictures of gilding...

After the mess is cleared away and it's all sharp and crisp

The flat gilding is always a different look from the raised, but it's so much easier to work with when you don't want to take forever.

Anyway, after I finally finished gilding all four cards, it was time to start painting! These pieces were a little weird in that they are very light on calligraphy and actual painting, and very very heavy on gilding and then ink/outlining. You'll see in a minute, here...

Really not a lot at all, but just enough color to give accent to the piece.

A closeup of one of my owls, just to give an idea of the fine brush strokes needed

A closeup of my first dove, which I was quite proud of

Learning experience time: I'm not someone who ordinarily does a lot of shading or paint-mixing when I do illuminations. I prefer to work with a simple, limited palette and not have to blend anything, because I either don't get enough contrast between my high, mid, and low tones, OR I don't mix enough of a particular color and have to keep remixing it, and never getting the color quite right. It's a personal hurdle in my development that I just... need to work on, whether I like it or not, if I want to move forward as an artist.

So for this piece, I actually did mix and blend and play with colors, and while I still ran out of color here and there, I was actually pretty happy with how the various birds came out, starting with this dove.

After laying in color, there was room for a little bit of whitework on each "LOVE" in the center of the page:

And then it was time to outline. Lots and lots of outlining. I used a brush and paint for this, rather than ink, because the surface was being resistant again, similar to un-pounced vellum. I'm a bit cranky about this. I know a lot of people who love to work with pergamenata, but I am not one of them. If it's paper, it should behave like paper and not require special preparation to use. If it's animal-skin vellum, I expect that to be a necessary step. I do not expect that to be the case for something that is essentially a fancy paper. Yes, I know, this is me being contrary. Yes, I know I need to get over it. But man, having the painting take three times as long as it should because I had to keep going over each line two or three or MORE times, to get the line to show up smoothly and not ragged, was really, really irritating.

Even with the difficulties, look at what an immense difference the outlining and "inking" makes compared to the relative openness of the left half of the card. The density of the vine work really makes itself known and the border finally distinguishes itself from the open space in the middle with the text.

The first finished card

This is one of the raised-gilding pages, so you can see the glimmer of the three-dimensional gold in the bottom left corner, where my hand has created a little bit of shadow on the page.

After that, it's just... more of the same: procrastinate, paint, procrastinate more, outline, admire the finished result, move on to the next card...

Closeup of one of the hawks

Closeup of a cardinal

Here we are with three of the cards done...

Third card

Closeup of another owl, and a look at the different look the flat gilding has compared to the raised

And finally, at long last, all four cards were finished, taken off the table, and laid out for this pretty picture.

I really need to go to the print shop and get some of these run off to try and fill in my new portfolio. The old one of course was destroyed, but I still have a number of pictures of my older work. I want to get those reprinted sometime so I can have something to show off.

Closeup of one of the cardinals

And that's pretty much it! I took a LOT of pictures of this project, so if anyone wants to see more shots of various hawks, owls, cardinals or doves, or a closer look at the white work on each "LOVE", just let me know. But for now, this post is complete! The project took most of the spring and summer to complete, thanks to my procrastination and a few other factors, but it was completed and sent to the client on September 1 and she tells me she really loved them. She's going to have them framed and delivered as gifts to three of her friends, and keep the fourth for herself.

I've been busier than just this over the summer, I promise, and in the next couple of weeks I hope to post a little more of what I've been up to. In the meantime, take care, one and all, and leave a comment if you liked what you saw here. Cheers!